Thinkific has been one of the most popular course platforms out there.

However, with new platforms entering the marketplace, is it really the best?

Or will you be betting on an old-school LMS?

The following review on Thinkific is based on real-life use cases from my 3 to 4 years of experience creating online courses.

Let’s dive in!

Feature	Description
Is a free plan available?	Varies by account/region. Trials may roll into paid, so please check your billing terms.
Starting price	$49/mo
Transaction fee	0%
Features	Online courses, bundles, and community
Competitors	Teachable, Podia, and Kajabi

What do I like about Thinkific? 👍

• Free plan (with no transaction fees): Unlike Teachable, which charges a 10% transaction fee on its free plan and a 5% fee on its Basic plan ($59/mo), Thinkific offers a free plan with 0% transaction fees.
• Superior lesson formats: Engage your students with various multimedia options, including audio, PDFs, quizzes, surveys, Google Docs, assessments, and live lessons. More than even Teachable!
• Advanced course capabilities: Streamline your course creation with scheduling, drip-feeding content, multiple instructors, course discussion areas, evergreen and expiring content, and more.
• Course-level engagement analytics: Get insight into your course’s performance with bird’s-eye view engagement, progress reports, overview and retention graphs, metrics for course videos, and integrations with analytics and marketing tools.
• Inbuilt community support: Unlike other platforms, Thinkific offers inbuilt community features.

What I don’t like about Thinkific? 👎

• Basic community feature: Their community feature is basic and lacks superior marketing and gamification features. Unlike platforms like Kajabi or Mighty Networks.
• Bulk enrollment is slow: Bulk student migration feels dated. CSVs must be uploaded per course, uploads are rate‑limited, and large enrollments can take significant time. It feels they’re stuck in 1990s.
• Limited design options: Create unique designs with Thinkific’s limited theme options or by using HTML and CSS.
• Lacks robust marketing features: Enhance your marketing efforts with a third-party sales funnel creation tool or integrate an email marketing automation service.
• Mobile app limitations: Their mobile apps (iOS and Android) are good for course viewing, but branding is limited unless you pay extra. Some lesson types and in-app purchases aren’t supported. To contrast, Teachable only has iOS app.
• Affiliate program requires manual work: The affiliate system lacks essential automation. You can’t bulk import affiliates, commission payouts need manual approval for each one, and the tracking dashboard is underwhelming.
• Customer support can be slow: A lot of users report delayed responses and ticket resolution.
• Slow product development: Thinkific is criticized for ignoring feature requests that the community has asked for repeatedly over many years. For instance, it falls short in bulk student management, advanced reporting, and SCORM support. Of course, they have implemented some UI enhancements and fancy AI course outliners and. stuff, but…

Explore Thinkific

Thinkific Review – Upfront bottom line

Thinkific is a focused course platform for creators who want to launch quickly without transaction fees. With Tcommerce one-step checkout, the buying process is smooth and conversion-friendly.

Now when it comes to courses:

Thinkific offers more lesson formats (audio, live lessons, surveys, exams), better bulk uploading, and a free plan with no transaction fees (Teachable charges 10% on free and 5% on Basic $59/mo).

It’s not an all-in-one solution.

It’ll be fine if you already have email marketing and sales funnels elsewhere. It excels at course creation and delivery, but if you need advanced community features or deep marketing automation, consider dedicated community platforms or all-in-one solutions like Kajabi.

Choose Thinkific, if your priority is shipping courses fast without complexity. You get solid student experience, reliable delivery, and straightforward monetization.

Interface has improved

The sidebar UI is clean and predictable. They have made a lot of enhancements that were long pending due.

Now, most of the UI interactions are 1–2 clicks away, and the wording/feature-labels feels familiar if you’ve ever touched Teachable

Earlier (an year back), the way by which they grouped features within illogical section headers was really tiring on your brain.

Now, it’s ALL GOOD!

Course creation is decent and fast

When you create a course in Thinkific, you have the option to choose from different templates or start from scratch.

You can start from scratch, use the AI outline generator, or pick a template (mini course, flagship course, etc.) to structure your content faster.

This is how the AI Outline Generator looks.

🚧 While the AI outline generator can give you a head start, it’s often better to come up with your own outline based on real-world data you’ve gathered about your target audience.

Course uploading and structuring

When you create a new course, you’ll need to create different sections first, and then add multiple lessons under each section.

There are various types of lessons you can create, such as video lessons, PDF lessons, text, audio, downloads, quizzes, assignments, and more.

What’s interesting is that Thinkific also supports some really unique lesson types, such as:

• Presentations
• Live lessons (using Zoom’s video meeting or webinar tools)
• Surveys
• Exams

These lesson formats are not available in some other course platforms like say Teachable.

You need to upload the video, and you can add some text and any relevant downloads that are related to it (say checklists or worksheets).

When you bulk upload, it maps your files to lessons automatically.

You can upload videos, audio, and PDFs in one go, then rename and reorder in a single pass.

It’s a real time‑saver when you’re updating multi‑module courses.

There’s a downside here.

👎 Unlike Teachable, Thinkific only allows for one type of content format per lesson. This means you can’t have a video followed by a quiz in the same lesson. You end up having separate lessons for each and every activity.

Quizzes and assessments

Thinkific offers quizzes, surveys, assignments, and Brillium exams for student assessments.

You can set “must pass” only on key checkpoints that truly gate understanding.

Everywhere else, use a quick quiz as a prerequisite to pace the course without killing momentum.

When a passing grade is required, students won’t hit 100% until they pass the gated quizzes.

If you prefer a lighter touch, keep the quiz as a prerequisite and let them move on once they’ve attempted it.

You can also control how students consume the content by making use of the “drip” feature.

See this:

At the chapter level, you can drip sections by days from enrollment date, to control the pace of say cohorts.

It’s perfect for 30 or 90-day challenges to stop binge-and-drop-off.

Also, if you don’t want to control the pace like this but want to ensure high course completion rates, you can set lessons as prerequisite.

Apart from this, Thinkific also supports:

• Randomized Question Bank.
• Importing quiz questions from an XLSX sheet.

Certification

When it comes to certification, there are 7+ templates to start with.

Pick one, customize it: edit text, colors, background, and logo.

Create a single master certificate style for your brand and reuse it across programs.

After you create a certificate, assign it to a course under “Course progress and completion” in the course settings.

You can set a certificate’s expiration date to motivate students to complete the course.

Depending on your use case, you can set it a few days from enrollment or on a specific date.

For example, if your course lasts 30 days, setting the certificate to expire in 90 days can encourage students to complete it, thus increasing your course completion rate.

These certificates will be delivered to students once they complete the course, right on the player page.

Additionally, under the “My Account” section, they can view their certificates at any time in the future, even if their course access has expired.

Student experience (frontend)

When students first load the course player, they can access the course curriculum on the left sidebar and the middle will display a large video player.

The discussion, download, and full-screen buttons will be located at the top right corner of the player.

Discussion opens in a sidebar, not below the lesson. To keep the thread alive, add a short “Discuss this” prompt at the end of lessons and remind learners in your first onboarding email.

The player is intentionally minimal. Pick light or dark once, set your primary brand color and font, and move on!

Student engagement reports

You can monitor the progress report of each of your students under the “Progress” section.

If you’re interested in per-video level analytics, you have overview and also retention graphs for every video.

You can get metrics for your course videos, such as the following:

• Average engagement: on average, how much the students have viewed the video.
• Total plays: the total number of times a video has been played.
• Play rate: the number of students who press play on the video after it has been loaded.
• Last watched and other crucial metrics

For site Analytics, you can also integrate Thinkfic with analytics tools such as Mixpanel, and Google Analytics.

Community is basic

Thinkific’s community feature is simple but functional. When you first land on the community home page, you’ll see a clean interface with a sidebar showing members, upcoming events, and discussion “Spaces.”

Before your students can jump in, you need to configure access settings. Head to your community settings and choose who gets in.

You have four access levels to pick from:

• Students who purchase this community as a standalone product
• All students logged into your site
• Students enrolled in selected courses or bundles
• Students in selected groups

👉 If community is part of your offer mix, you can sell it standalone, include it inside memberships and bundles, or surface it as an order bump or upsell. Keep Spaces tightly mapped to courses so learners see the invite right inside the player.

Once access is granted, students can log in and interact with other members through discussion Spaces. You can link these Spaces directly to specific courses, so when someone enrolls, they see a community invite right inside the course player.

This tight integration makes discovery natural. Students don’t have to hunt for the community, it’s just there.

But here’s where it gets limited.

Thinkific’s community covers the basics: posts, events, and Spaces work fine for light interaction. But you won’t find gamification, automation, or the depth that dedicated community platforms offer.

If community is a core part of your business model (not just a nice-to-have), you’ll probably outgrow this fast. Consider pairing Thinkific with a dedicated community platform or switching to an all-in-one like Kajabi or Mighty Networks.

One more thing.

The free Thinkific Mobile app (included in Start and Grow plans) lets students access courses and communities on the go. But if you want custom branding in the app, you’ll need the Branded Mobile app add-on at $199/mo.

Website builder (Decent for courses)

The site builder covers the essentials. You get global themes, brand colors, and sections to ship clean, on‑brand course sites fast.

For heavy funnel work or deep design control, keep using your CMS or an all‑in‑one like Kajabi.

When you choose a theme in Thinkific, it applies across all your pages, including the homepage, course pages, community pages, and any custom pages you create.

To edit a page, you can use Thinkific’s page builder.

There are around 20 different sections, including testimonials, FAQs, pricing details, upsells, reviews, lead capture and more.

👎 While the Thinkific page builder is more limited than other funnel-building software like Kajabi or ClickFunnels, it’s still better than Teachable’s, which doesn’t offer a visual page builder.

Sales and marketing (Good!)

Sales tools are practical and focused.

You get one‑step checkout (Tcommerce), order bumps, and clean post‑purchase flows.

Payment processors

Thinkific has Tcommerce, and it adds wallets, buy-now-pay-later, and order bumps.

If you’re in other unsupported regions you need to still use Stripe or PayPal.

It has the features like:

• Buy now pay later, wallets, and bank redirects.
• Enables Order Bumps to boost profit.
• Handles compliance automatically.

After the payment setup, you can configure course pricing.

Thinkific offers flexible after-purchase flows that map to specific product prices.

You can direct customers to a custom URL or a thank-you page that contains additional products as upsell, based on the price at which they buy the product.

Checkout page

By default, Thinkific uses a two-step checkout. You enter your details first, then payment info on the next page.

But with Thinkific Payments (Tcommerce), you get a one-step checkout instead.

This unlocks more payment methods and lets you add order bumps and social login at checkout, which can boost conversions.

Bundles and coupons

Thinkific allows you to bundle related products together and sell them at a discount. For this you just need to create a new bundle and add different products that will be part of the bundle.

You can offer different pricing and a unique post-purchase workflow for the bundles you create.

Although a bundle can contain multiple products, it is considered an individual product when it coems to availability of all settings.

Sales widgets (Embeds)

Thinkific’s page builder is limited.

If you’re hosting on WordPress or Squarespace, you can still use Thinkific’s checkout through sales widgets.

These widgets let you embed “buy now” buttons directly on your site.

You just need to select the product and customize the colors. Then, generate the code snippet and embed it in the head section of your blog or website.

Affiliates and revenue partners

When it comes to effectively promoting courses in collaboration with others, Thinkific provides two key features:

1. Revenue partners
2. Affiliate program

Look at this:

Revenue Partners let you split course revenue with collaborators automatically.

But if affiliates are a growth lever, you need note the downsides:

• No bulk import or automation for onboarding. Every affiliate is manual.
• Commission payouts require manual approvals, one by one.
• Click tracking is limited and the affiliate dashboard isn’t compelling. We saw top affiliates disengage and revenue drop after the switch.

Bottom line? This is fine for small programs. For scaled affiliate ops, use a dedicated affiliate platform and connect it to Thinkific.

Integrations and App store (good!)

Thinkific has a dedicated app store where we can discover all the apps that Thinkific integrates with across different categories like email marketing, business operations, engagement, selling, site design, so on.

Thinkific has direct integration with popular email marketing providers. These are MailChimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, Drip, and Aweber.

However, if you are using email marketing software that Thinkific does not integrate with, you need to use Zapier or other integration solutions.

It has apps in different categories including site design.

For instance, there’s the “Sections Kit” app developed by Rob.

It enables you to add 80 new page sections to the limited site builder that Thinkific comes with.

Mobile app

Thinkific gives you a custom-branded mobile app with their Start or Grow plan.

It looks impressive at first glance. The app lets you send different kinds of notifications – from regular updates to drip lesson releases, and also community activity alerts.

But here’s the catch:

• Limited lesson type support: Quizzes, surveys, assignments, presentations, and live videos are not supported on the app.
• Restricted community features: Members can’t access the directory to connect with other members in DMs, and they can’t attend community events live on mobile.
• No in-app purchases: Unlike other apps like Kajabi, Thinkific doesn’t support in-app purchases. This really limits your ability to sell more products to your existing students.

For what they’re charging, these are serious limitations that can impact both student experience and your revenue potential.

Pricing

Thinkific offers 4 pricing tiers that fit different needs.

Most people go with either the Basic ($49/mo) or Start ($99/mo) plan.

But if you need more powerful features like detailed analytics, advanced course-building tools, or want to remove Thinkific branding, you might want to look at the higher plans.

👍 Here’s the good part: Unlike Teachable, Thinkific doesn’t limit how many courses you can create with their paid plans. And it doesn’t charge any transaction fees, while Teachable charges 5% on their Basic plan ($59/mo).

Verdict

Thinkific is a strong alternative to Teachable, especially if you want unlimited course creation and reliable customer support without arbitrary restrictions.

Unlike Teachable, Thinkific doesn’t cap your course numbers on paid plans and has significantly improved its analytics capabilities.

That said, it’s not an all-in-one solution. Compared to platforms like Kajabi, Thinkific still lacks built-in marketing automation and robust website building. Its community features are basic, and the mobile app has notable limitations around lesson types, community access, and in-app purchases.

Thinkific excels at course delivery and student management, but you’ll need external tools for advanced marketing and community engagement.